Glasshouse of New Americans


  • Photographer
    Jill Enfield
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    2017
  • Technical Info
    ambrotype scans onto glass

The 3-month solo installation, 6 galleries, leaves Ellis Island on September 4. Daughter of Holocaust survivors, Jill Enfield uses the old world wet collodion photographic technique of “New Americans” to remind us that convenience of current air travel does not deny that the path of immigration remains perilous, just as it was in steerage on a steamship in the 1800’s. Her portraits, of immigration individuals, arrived during the 1960s or after. The installation is a glass house, of transparent immigrant portraits placed onto antique windows, which observers can enter or view from the exterior. The 45 abandoned antique windows were collected from flea markets, construction sites and roadsides throughout the Hudson Valley. All windows were then assembled into a single house, the clear windows replaced with wet plate collodion portraits of the immigrants. The message, “People in glass houses should not throw stones. We are all immigrants.”

Story



Whenever I view the vintage photographs of new immigrants to America from the 1800s and early 1900s, I am always drawn to how the individuals in the images must have felt. Why did they uproot themselves and undertake an arduous, often dangerous or even deadly journey across a vast ocean, to the unknown? What profound conditions drove them to leave their rooted, ancestral homes? Was there crying, pleading, threatening, severing of all ties? Would there be anyone waiting for them in the New World? A cousin, a friend? Maybe no one. No prospects were guaranteed. There was only desperate hope for a new start – a new life.

It would be a strange and harsh world, with a new language, no one to depend on, no roots. These had to be courageous people, to arrive in a cold city undoubtedly nothing like they had imagined. The hosts of the nation were far from hospitable: Right on the docks were recruitment officers to enlist men into the Civil War, or work gangs, or sweatshops. With luck, some new immigrants might become a city worker, or get to live in the maid’s quarters of a hotel or a rich man’s house. But most would find themselves squeezed into squalid, disease-infested, “Old Law” tenements on teeming street on the Lower East Side.

Back then, wet-collodion process was familiar enough that viewers of the age took it for granted, seldom curious of conditions of those pictured. An uncountable number of wet-collodion images were lost in a sea of other images, ignored by the general public of that era. Nobody of any import took time or interest.

Now the reigning format, of course, is digital. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants are digitally recorded and as equally overlooked as their ancestors were. And just as those immigrants of yesteryear were ignored or treated with disdain and suspicion, so, too, are the new Americans, who must also cope with fears of terrorism far worse than the public notions of mere “anarchists” back then. We make the same mistakes based on ignorance, and fail to perceive the potential of adventurous risk-takers who are more likely than most to transcend the odds and achieve something great.

Today’s “New Americans,” have an easier physical journey by air than their predecessors did in steerage, but their risks are just as great, their fears just as valid. And with the current digital mode of photographic record, their faces are just as lost amid a sea of billions of pixels, their lives taken for granted.

I use our public perception of the wet-plate collodion process to give these brave individuals a leg up in the New World. Maybe the newspapers articles about illegal immigrants stealing a dwindling supply of employment and tax dollars will bear less of a toll if the newcomers can be seen with the romance of the wet-plate collodion process. In each of my wet-plate collodion images, The New Americans are heroes, each with his or her own inspirational story.

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